(1908-1972) Adolfo Victor Casais Monteiro was born in Porto on 4th July 1908, having received the liberal education typical of Porto’s bourgeoisie. When he was in the academic milieu and influenced by Leonardo Coimbra, Casais Monteiro published, still as an undergraduate, the poetry book Confusão [Confusion] (1929). That same year, he assumed a position on the board of the magazine A Águia. In 1931, Casais Monteiro was welcomed at the board of the Coimbra magazine Presença, which he coordinated together with Gaspar Simões and José Régio, until 1940. These magazines were helpful in the promotion... Read More

(1937- ) More than a Portuguese poet, Alberto Pimenta is since early on, a poet of Europe. He is also a poet whose linguistic, cultural and even mythological knowledge of the continent as a whole and of some of its countries in particular, enables him to adopt a poetic-political positioning not only as a questioner, but also as a forecaster of the European destinies. If, for many years, this poet, fictionist, dramaturg, essayist, performer, television protagonist of “Arte de ser Português” [The Art of Being Portuguese] was sent into oblivion, the tendency has been –... Read More

(1980- ) Aurélien Bellanger is a writer, essayist, radio chronicler – even if sporadically – French actor born in Laval, France. Having a philosophical training, he published a laudatory essay about the poetry of the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq, significantly titled Houellebecq écrivain romantique [Houellebecq romantic writer] (2010). He soon pursued a literary career, precisely in the stylistic and thematic wake of Houellebecq, making his début with a first novel about five hundred pages long, La Théorie de l’information [The Theory of Information] (2012), in relation to which Bellanger stated he had tried to... Read More

(1919-1978) Born in Lisbon in 1919, Jorge de Sena led a life of physical, intellectual and cultural itinerancies, which the intense poetic, fictional and essayistic production bears witness to. As a Navy cadet he travelled along the Portuguese-speaking African coast. In Portugal, he dwelled between Lisbon and Porto, the city where he graduated in Civil Engineering, in 1944. He worked for fourteen years at the Lisbon Directorate-General of the Urbanisation Services and at the Portuguese Road Authority, until, for political reasons, he was forced into exile. In 1959, for opposing the Estado Novo [New State]... Read More

(1969 – ) The Portuguese contemporary poet José Miguel Silva (born in 1969) published, until 2017, the following books: O Sino de Areia [The Sand Bell] (1999), Ulisses já não Mora Aqui [Ulysses Doesn’t Live Here Anymore] (2002), Vista para um Pátio seguido de Desordem [View of a Patio Followed by Disorder] (2003), Movimentos no Escuro [Movements in the Dark] (2005), Walkmen (with Manuel de Freitas, 2007), Erros Individuais [Individual Mistakes] (2010), Serém, 24 de Março (2011) e Últimos Poemas [Last Poems] (2017). In 2002 he participated in the anthology Poetas sem Qualidades [Poets Without... Read More

(1923-1993) Natália Correia in her poem “Manhã cinzenta” [Grey Morning], dated April 1946 (one of her first originals of her complete poetry), addresses the event that marked all of her life-work: the departure from the island of São Miguel, in the Azores – where she was born in 1923 – to Lisbon, where she would pass away about seventy years later, in 1993. In the book Poemas [Poems] (1955), the reader rediscovers the mildly nostalgic and lucid eye of Natália in relation to her island, in “Retrato talvez saudoso da menina insular” [Portrait, Maybe Nostalgic,... Read More

(1966-) Born in Lisbon, Rui Cóias attended Law school at Coimbra University, obtained a post-graduation in Juridical Sciences and presently studies Philosophy, at Lisbon’s New University. He published three poetry books: A Função do Geógrafo [The Function of the Geographer] (2000), A Ordem do Mundo [The World’s Order] (2006) and Europa [Europe] (2015). The former two were translated in several countries, like Belgium and France. Besides these volumes, some of his texts figure in several anthologies and collective publications, both in Portugal, and in some European and American countries, which demonstrates the wide reception spectrum of... Read More

(1933-1978) Like the sea, the wind and the sun constitute themselves as metaphors for Ruy Belo’s precepted existence, Europe, too, presents itself in this poet, as consistent and transtemporal summits to reveal a point of view over the experienced reality even if it appears more sporadic, diffuse, sometimes just circumstantially. The pronounced subjectivity of the poetic voice, which seeks the conciliation of a me in auto-vigilance and anguish mode, is countered by a frontal and lucid eye regarding an observable, experienced exterior, selected according to ideological and ethical beliefs, marked by an evident European cultural... Read More

(1971-) Notwithstanding being mostly known to the public as a prose writer, what cannot be disregarded is the fact that Valter Hugo Mãe possesses fourteen poetry books, assembled in Folclore Íntimo [Intimate Folklore] (2008) and Contabilidade [Accountancy] (2010). A personal and explicit conception about Europe seems more evident in the prose than in the poetry of this author, that can be corroborated by the fact that, throughout Contabilidade, the term “Europe” does not appear, explicitly, a single time. However, if on the one hand, the poetry of Valter Hugo Mãe “is not an end in itself, but... Read More